Immediate_Area9178 t1_j9yzfh4 wrote on February 25, 2023 at 4:35 PM

This doesn’t really fit here, but I started reading some of Baum’s other works because I got curious. There’s a story I started where two children are turned into birds and are trying to turn back with the help of their new avian caretakers.

The story is actually pretty dark in many parts. There’s a particularly haunting scene where this mother bird is desperate to have her eggs back and her mate, only to fly to a house and find they’d all been taxidermied. She flies to the window everyday to just sit and stare at them, unable to carry on until she gets killed herself and is put on display alongside her mate.

It’s one of the most haunting scenes I’ve ever read and that’s just one of the little side notes mentioned in the story. There are many more, but after that I decided not to read his stuff for a while.

VengefulMight OP t1_j9z5jmw wrote on February 25, 2023 at 5:15 PM

The period before WW1 is remembered as an Age of Innocence but it had its own macabre stuff.

Many of the books bound in human skin, are from the late 19th century and were poor people whom the doctors felt entitled to use their skin to remember them by.

General Kitchener the head of the British Army, kept a human skull he had taken from a dead chieftain and used it to store pencils in.